Two Literary Critics: Barack Obama & Frank Kermode

The other day I came across Columbia professor and W. H. Auden scholar Edward Mendelson's short blog entry at the New York Review of Books on a critique President Barack Obama wrote while still quite young on T. S. Eliot's landmark poem "The Waste Land." (Let me say that though I decry the racially exclusive precincts of New York Review of Books, which only intermittently publishes critical reviews by or about writing by authors who are not white, I nevertheless explore its free blog site, which often offers provocative, distilled commentary by smart people on a range of current topics.) This letter has, as Mendelson notes, sparked a range of commentary, some praising the president's critical judgment and some reading it as incomplete, hasty and deficient in one way or another. It is certainly brief, and not a full essay, so any praise has to account for its partial quality. Additionally, Eliot scholars, Modernist academics and critics of Anglo-American literary might dispute its formulation of how to read and understand the St. Louis-born, High Anglican convert, poet, playwright, and essayist.

What struck me, though, to echo Mendelson, was the acuteness of the assessment, the deep understanding and ability to articulate, in concise, lapidary fashion what Eliot was wrestling with not just in "The Waste Land" but throughout his work, which scholarship over the last 50 years has increasingly revealed. The tensions between the material and sexual, on the one hand, and the spiritual, abstract and ascetic, on the other, are evident not only in a poem like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which opens with a sensuous simile that is also deeply suffused with the morbid--"like a patient etherized upon a table"--and which one could read as an extended negotiation between the "asexual purity" and "brutal sexual realism" (especially evident in some of his bawdy, racist college and post-graduate poetry, or in the anti-Semitic "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," which appears in Poems (1920), to give two examples) that culminates in a broken reverie culminating in the very morbidity with which the poem began--"till mermaids wake us, and we drown." (Can I also just register here how enduring strange--bizarre--Eliot's two 1920 collections, Poems and Prufrock and Other Observations are? I mean, many of these poems, at least in my reading, have lost none of their thematic and linguistic weirdness, even though they are for the most part formally retrograde at this point.)

That Obama was still a young man--a student? I did not read the David Maraniss biography from which Mendelson draws the quoted material--makes this assessment all the more remarkable. Or rather, based on my experience as a teacher of literature and a wide-ranging reader, it is rare. Even my best students for the most part would not be summarizing a work and an author so pithily. That the President, who studied political science, if I'm remembering correctly, can do so, makes it that much more impressive. Mendelson has more to say about Obama's critical reading of Eliot's form of conservatism, which was less idealist and utopian than realist and socially grounded, so I recommend reading his complete entry. It isn't "TL;dr" by any means. He concludes by speaking of his mixed feelings about Obama's tenure given his high expectations in 2008, and notes whether the "fatalism" that the president expresses in the letter, in agreement with Eliot, is even desirable in a politician.

I wonder, however, given Obama's rhetoric in his first term, during which he repeatedly expressed what I sometimes felt to be candy-colored expectations about his ability to work with the GOP, which had vowed--publicly, and we have since learned, secretly--to oppose him at every step, whether that "fatalism" was not a useful opinion that his subsequent political rise dispelled. This was a man who ran for the US Senate at a time in which only two Black people ever had been elected to that body, and in a state in which another Black person--Carole Moseley Braun--had previously been elected almost miraculously then lost her reelection bid. In that election, Obama espoused an agenda that was considerably to the left of his Democratic primary opponents, then stayed left in his policy prescriptions as he faced the Republicans, yet won in a landslide. His speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention was anything but "fatalistic"; it was almost narcotic in its optimism, and unsurprisingly elevated him in the national consciousness. He then dared to run for the presidency after only four in the Senate, knowing full well that no candidate from that house who had not also served as governor had been elected in 48 years, yet he did so against one of the most formidable candidates in politics--who is running again--and, defeating her, then went on to soundly defeat his Republican opponent--again.

One way of looking at Obama's choices would be to point to a laser-sharp opportunism, but even the most opportunistic candidate might have feared taking on Daley's Chicago machine in 2004, or Hillary Clinton in 2008. (I was fortunate enough to meet Barack Obama as he was running for the Senate, and told friends that he was the real thing, and would win in November.) What I think Mendelson misses, but what has become clear during Obama's two terms, is that for all the missteps, the triaging, the cynicism, the tinselly rhetoric that was clearly meant to be just that, the president does possess a capacity to see quite deeply into the hallmark of many issues--not all, but quite a few--and think several steps ahead, which is rare quality no matter what sort of person we're talking about. Part of this may involve calculation, in the negative sense of that word, which means that someone and some things will have to be sacrificed in favor of some larger goal, and that the particulars and niceties may be fudged, but it also has meant that for all of the GOP's opposition, Obama has pulled off a string of successes that will resonate for decades to come. To put it another way, he has been transformative, and his successes have resulted not from intuitiveness or (just) luck, but from being able to see that by achieving certain things--the Affordable Care Act, for example--a range of other things might come into being.

The fact that this is how he has operated has infuriated progressives--I am one--and upset many of his liberal supporters, but it is also the case that conservatives of the utopian kind--not Eliot's crew--and racists have been pushed to levels of rage that make the emergence of a figure like Donald Trump utterly comprehensible. He is the material emanation of that conservative rage, and whether he wins the nomination or not, his political prominence, despite his clear insufficiency for the job, is a sign not just of how effective Barack Obama has been as president, but how many of the policies resulting from his analytical skills, have proved. Whether they or his policies have proved enough is another issue, though by many objective indicators, the country is doing well, even if communities within it are still struggling. I say this not as exoneration but in a spirit of realism; to put it another way that 11th dimension chess approach that some commentators have called joked about and that the squib about Eliot makes clear has worked in some key ways, though it's also led to a blindness about other things.

This blog post's title suggests that I was going to talk not just about Barack Obama but also about the analytical skills of the late critic Frank Kermode (1919-2010), so let me conclude by pointing J's Theater readers to the essay of his that Mendelson cites, "Eliot and the Shudder," which appeared in the London Review of Books shortly before Kermode died at the age of 90. It was originally to be a lecture about William Shakespeare, to be delivered at a lecture for that publication. What resulted, however, is an astonishing piece of literary analysis, so effortless in its learning, so organic (a troublesome word these days, I know) in its argumentation, that it strikes me both as the very best model one could follow and yet almost impossible to reproduce. It is a remarkable tour (de force) of discussion about literature, aesthetics, emotion, faith, sexuality, and so much more that also gives deep insight also into how the word "shudder" itself carries particular kinds of emotional and metaphysical charges in English. This single word, Kermode shows, can convey both an involuntary physiological and emotional response as well as a profoundly sublime one. That strangeness that I noted above in Eliot's poetry is a hallmark of literary effects that can produce a "shudder" in a reader, as Kermode makes clear. A different approach on Eliot than Obama's, certainly, but in the case of both, whether in teardrop or cataract form, two readings--and minds--that, without question, show what a little thinking can do.

Ian S. MacNiven's "Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions

Say you were born at the start of World War I, the second son and heir to a prominent Northeastern steel company fortune on your father's side, and a wealthy, patrician family on your mother's; and say your family milieu was conservative, stolid, pious--a bit narrow-minded, snobbish and prejudiced--but with some sense of civic duty and responsibility; and say your own father, who had gone to Princeton and expected you to as well suffered from serious mental health issues for which there was neither analytic or pharmacological relief, and those same mental health issues would hover around you all your life, manifesting themselves fairly late in life, and your mother was fairly cool to you from the moment of your birth, though you had other powerful, rich female figures who stepped into the breach with love and guidance.

And say you, this scion, had both artistic and scholarly interests, nurtured at your preparatory school, and instead of desiring to follow your older brother into the steel company business you had aesthetic leanings, and chose, to your father's disappointment, to enter Harvard, where you promptly encountered, as your roommate, another extremely wealthy scion and art collector, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., and by the end of your freshman year you were palling about with the likes of Robert Fitzgerald, Wayne Andrews and Robert Lowell, befriending slightly older prominent cultural avatars like Lincoln Kirstein and Sherry Mangan, and eccentrics like John Brooks Wheelwright, while also chatting up and dining with the Norton Professor of Poetry, who happened to be the by-then increasingly world famous T. S. Eliot; and say that in part through Eliot's intercession and your own boldness you were able to meet another poet you idolized, Ezra Pound, living in Rapallo, in Italy, and instead of encouraging you toward a career as a poet and scholar (as he certainly was in the first case and might be considered eccentrically in the second) he (apocryphally) urged you to become a publisher.

If you somehow happened to fit all those conditions and took the advice of Pound, you would be James Laughlin IV, who did found a publishing house, initially by compiling an annual anthology called New Directives, which eventually would New Directions Publishing Corporation. Laughlin did this while still a Harvard undergraduate, and as Ian S. MacNiven's ample, enjoyable biography "Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2014) makes clear, Laughlin's creative and intellectual affinities, combined with a compulsion to work, played a key role in the development of what we think of as American literary Modernism, particularly in terms of poetry. When Laughlin got going in the late 1930s, of course, Eliot and Pound, as well as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Louis Zukovsky, and others had already begun publishing their work, and several of these poets, like Eliot, were already well known and acclaimed.

Yet Laughlin's decision to bring together reprint older and newer work by them, particularly in terms of Pound and Williams, set the stage for their wider recognition. That he managed this in the midst of attending classes and sitting for exams, participating in other school activities like the Harvard Advocate, taking off on holidays to ski--once missing by half a year frantic communiqués from Williams to print more copies of the great poet's collection White Mule, which had received excellent reviews, because Laughlin was off in New Zealand and nearly impossible to reach--and semesters to traipse about Europe (expressing pro-Nazi sentiments at first, until he woke up), and courting various young women, is almost mind-boggling. It did take him seven years to complete his degree, though he did earn it cum laude. (As for the skiing, he would soon thereafter establish a ski resort, Alta, still standing and drawing afficionados in Utah.)

Laughlin did manage all of this and more, though not without the assiduous assistance of a range of people, some of them noteworthy figures in their own right, including writers Kenneth Rexroth, Hayden Carruth, and Delmore Schwartz, until the latter's paranoia finally drove him away not only from Laughlin but to an early death, while other longstanding helpmeets, like Gertrude Huston, for many years his mistress, in-house designer and eventually his third and final wife, remain little known even today to history. MacNiven guides readers through Laughlin's entire history, beginning with the origins of the American Laughlins, originally from Ireland though they liked to claim Scottish heritage--it being more respectable--and their march toward industrial success, which provided James Laughlin with the financial means to pursue his avocation. Indeed, MacNiven does not stint on details at any point, though as the years progress and events pile upon themselves, he does start to pare the tapestry of the narrative down.

At its core lies several main threads: Laughlin's longstanding relationship with Pound, which would be perhaps the most important of his adult life; his struggles with his own art-making, and the persistent feeling that his work and life--except the womanizing--not only kept him away from but overshadowed his pressing desire to write poems; his lurking fear of having inherited the family's "madness," which destroyed his father and several uncles; and his musical chair games with his female lovers, some of whom, like Huston, became his wife, while others, like Lady Maria (Britneva) St. Just, would retain his lifelong affection. MacNiven devotes many pages to each of these biographical strands, using a great deal of Laughlin's personal--and often erotic--poetry not just for illustration but sometimes as factual proof. I had not thought of Laughlin as a documentary poet, but sometimes, MacNiven suggests, particularly in works like Byways, he was.

Though I was familiar with Pound's history, a good deal of the material here felt new to me, in part because of how important Laughlin's hand was in making Pound's reputation, pushing it relentlessly despite the elder poet's diffidence and truculence, and, as his World War II fascistic radio broadcasts represented, treasonous behavior. From Pound Laughlin gained not just a landmark author--crazy as he was--but ideas, however ill-formed, about poetry, art, economics, the world, as well as a deep intellectual, almost filial bond. Pound provided a male anchor that Laughlin's father Hughart could not. Laughlin did not have a particular aesthetic or even political stance, or rather, belonged to no school, but he did possess a keen eye for the new and formally experimental, particularly through the first 25 years of his firm, and Pound and Pound's poetry, like William Carlos Williams and his work, was central to that sense of what poetry could be. As the biography's title demonstrates, Laughlin even communicated in his letters using a playful, faux-naif Poundian idiom for his entire adult life. Pound grows no less politically repulsive here, but, especially in terms of Laughlin's life and career, considerably more significant.

Part of Laughlin's connection with Pound involved a casual attitude to racial and ethnic slurs, though Laughlin had already begun to break away from a good deal of the racism and ethnocentrism of his familial milieu by the time he reached college; at the college of "Jews and Beaconhillites," as his father labeled it, he was casting a far wider social net than anyone in his family could imagine, and not just for lunch dates and evening parties. (And Williams, half-Puerto Rican, was no stranger to racist slurs either.) Alongside the devotion to Pound, MacNiven shows, Laughlin spotted a great deal of other talent, either directly or after the recommendation of others. He nearly became the publisher of Elizabeth Bishop, for example, but for a sexist comment; he did, however, catch on early with Tennessee Williams and the impoverished Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who would become a sensation in the US, and two of his other favorites, Henry Miller and Thomas Merton, would serve as central figures of wings of the American counterculture for years to come. He also introduced a great deal of Modernist European literature, as well as some Asian and Latin American writing, into American bookstores, schools and homes, including Gabriel García Lorca, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Cardenal, and Hermann Hesse, whose Siddhartha remains a strong backlist seller. Alongside these authors, his Alvin Lustig-designed covers--with other famous designers, including Ray Johnson later--would become iconic for generations of readers, especially young ones.

Part of his prospecting came as a result of his work, which I had never heard about, for the Ford Foundation, working in conjunction with the University of Chicago's former boy-genius of a president Robert Maynard Hutchins. As Laughlin's marriage disintegrated and his relationship with his eldest son Henry remained contentious (a younger son, Robert, suffering from what was probably inherited bipolar disorder, would commit suicide in New York in the 1970s), the publisher-poet traveled all over the globe, leaving his company in the care of a trusted assistant, and serving as an editor-publisher for Ford's and the US government's Cold War (and propagandistic) national literary annuals. While in Asia he immersed himself in what was for him mostly unknown literary traditions, except where Pound had offered glimmers, with the result that he ended up bringing out volumes by Raja Rao, Osamu Dazai, Yukio Mishima.

Although Laughlin did mostly shed his family's anti-Semitism, and included Hughes in an early annual, MacNiven notes that he published no African American authors, yet strangely does not mention perhaps the first one--and for many years the only one--whose books he did, Bob Kaufman, one of the most original Beat and midcentury poets. Laughlin also published few Asian American or Latino (other than Williams, though until recently he was not considered such) authors till far into his publishing tenure, and in general was no great pacesetter in terms of race. He also missed out on publishing many of the major Beat poets, finding their behavior repellent, though he did issue works by important members of other mid-century experimental schools, including the San Francisco Renaissance (Duncan, Ferlinghetti) and the Black Mountain writers (Creeley, Levertov), as well as Gary Snyder, who would later count as one New Directions' Pulitzer Prize winners.

Another blind spot, oddly, was the New York School, three of whose members, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara, attended Harvard a decade after Laughlin. In fiction, the domestic track record was quite eccentric, but Kay Boyle, John Hawkes, Edward Dahlberg, and later Walter Abish and Clarice Lispector would be among the great finds. (After his death, of course, came the polestars of W. G. Sebald and the inexhaustible Roberto Bolaño.) He published one of Vladimir Nabokov's first books written in English, but passed on Lolita. (Imagine if he had taken it.) Barney Rosset's Grove Press, which emerged in the late 1950s, was a spur to get back on the ball. One of the pleasures of this biography is MacNiven's accounts of Laughlin's interactions with many of these figures, including Djuna Barnes and the wily Nabokov; as his days start to dwindle in the 1970s and his great friends die, a wistful tone colors his correspondence and tinges MacNiven's prose. In these final 20 years, particularly as Laughlin's health worsened, Guy Davenport becomes a key correspondent, which provided the pretext for one of the late examples of Laughlin's daring, which involved pushing for the publication of Davenport's potentially scandalous prose. (There was, however, no scandal.)

I should note that I never met James Laughlin in person, though he was still alive when New Directions accepted Annotations; I believe we may have spoken on the phone, though we mainly communicated through the intermediary of then editor, now President of the firm Barbara Epler. I knew that he was well up in years and spent most of his time in Connecticut, though I had no sense of the larger story of the firm, its rich and often ground-breaking history, or of Laughlin himself. I did know that he wanted to have a glossary at the end of the book, in part to learn what "rudipoots" were, and that he was willing to sign off on the book's publication. He got the glossary, the book appeared, he passed away shortly thereafter, and it would be almost thirty years later--today--through MacNiven's efforts that I discovered a great deal more about this extraordinary person, his important work as poet and publisher, and about a vital sector of the  landscape of 20th century American and global literature.